I baked a lemon cake that is basically taken from the book Cake Love. This cake is unusual because it has chunks of lemon baked into the cake. I had to try it because I’d never seen this technique before. In this cake it produced a delightful effect with lemony pockets where the lemon sections had been. They actually turned into lemon lined hollows in the cake, with the moisture sucked out of the lemons. However, the cake itself is a sugar bomb and was much too sweet to my taste, so I wanted to try the lemon pockets in a cake that wasn’t so sweet.

I tried using the same method using the Buttermilk Country Cake, which is my favorite yellow cake. And this technique didn’t work at all. The lemon sections kind of disappeared.

So I’m left wondering what sort of cakes can this method work with. Why did it work with one and not the other. Did the super high sugar content suck the moisture out of the lemons? What is the least sweet cake I can make and use this technique?

The sugar is in the “creaming” section: 16 ounces plus 2 tablespoons, which is about double the amount of flour. The CakeLove guy has a philosophy of minimizing the fat and maximizing the sugar—-the opposite of what Rose does. So this cake has roughly 16 oz of sugar, 8.5 oz of flour and something like 5.5 oz of fat, if I count cream cheese as 50% of its weight.

If I cut the sugar in half, say, it begins to resemble the Buttermilk Country Cake except for lacking the buttermilk, and the leavening being rather different. It seemed to me to make more sense to just jump straight to a well designed, tasty cake as the base for the lemons. Since that didn’t work…would cutting the sugar in half in the original recipe be expected to work much differently?

It seemed to me to make more sense to just jump straight to a well designed, tasty cake as the base for the lemons. Since that didn’t work…would cutting the sugar in half in the original recipe be expected to work much differently?

When you’re doing an experiment, it pays to make one change at a time. Yes, if you make several changes at once and it works, you’ve saved a lot of time, but when it doesn’t, as is usually the case, you’re kind of at a dead end. I don’t know whether just reducing the sugar would work differently….that’s why you do the experiment. I probably wouldn’t start off by reducing the sugar by 50%; I’d start off with smaller reductions and see how the cake changes as you use less sugar.

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It seemed to me to make more sense to just jump straight to a well designed, tasty cake as the base for the lemons. Since that didn’t work…would cutting the sugar in half in the original recipe be expected to work much differently?

When you’re doing an experiment, it pays to make one change at a time. Yes, if you make several changes at once and it works, you’ve saved a lot of time, but when it doesn’t, as is usually the case, you’re kind of at a dead end. I don’t know whether just reducing the sugar would work differently….that’s why you do the experiment. I probably wouldn’t start off by reducing the sugar by 50%; I’d start off with smaller reductions and see how the cake changes as you use less sugar.

Certainly it makes sense to vary one parameter at a time when experimenting in order to determine, for example, the functions and behaviors of different ingredients. But cake baking is not an unknown area, where the only way to understand this is to perform exhaustive experiments. A great deal is already known about cake baking, and I would prefer to build on that knowledge rather than reinvent it. Note that it’s also possible that changing a single parameter at a time will never lead to success because of the interdependence of the parameters, so approaching this through an exhaustive trial-and-error method could require me to bake dozens of cakes. Or I could get stuck with recipes that have certain characteristics and never realize that the answer was to make some radical departure from the starting point. If my goal is impossible—-e.g. because the high sugar content is necessary to dry out the lemon pockets—-I can never figure that out through a purely trial-and-error experimental approach. I can only note that cake number 73 failed like the last 72.

Maybe you can also add lemon zest which will help to counter the sweetness. Rose uses 6 oz butter + 2/3 c. sour cream in her yellow cake for 8.5 oz flour—which is about equal fat to that cake with its butter + cc + sour cream + heavy cream (I don’t have BCC in front of me, but her ratios are usually pretty similar across butter cakes), so it seems to me that he’s just adding a whole bunch of sugar and not lessening the fat much at all. 80% of the non-Rose cakes I see use equal volume sugar & flour, which is 2x weight of suagar:flour, so his sugar content is pretty “mainstream normal.”

BCC is also my fave of Rose’s yellows, too. That and the Golden Lux Butter Cake!

That said, I don’t get the difference between the lemony hollows and the lemon disappearing. I think I get the lemony hollows concept, if I’m imagining it right, but not the disappearing in the BCC. Can you describe that more?

I also noticed that this recipe uses 1/4 t. baking soda and, if I remember correctly, BCC uses baking powder. The soda may have neutralized something in the lemons to make it work better.

Finally, I see he uses AP flour (with just a bit of corn starch) and Rose uses cake flour. That could have something to do with it, too—maybe total cake flour can’t support the lemon pieces?

While Charles T. is correct in that it makes sense to change one thing at a time, I’m thinking the flour and the leavening differences (although I forget what the leavning in BCC is exactly) might be the culpret preventing this BCC version from working. I know, in Rose’s, if you want to use AP flour, you can usually avoid a dip by reducing BP by 1/4 t. per 9x2 inch layer, so you can try that, although the texture is still a bit different—a fluffy, but slightly larger and denser/moister (you can interpret that either way) crumb.

Sounds like a really interesting cake!!!!! I’d love for it to work out, less sweetly!!

Maybe you can also add lemon zest which will help to counter the sweetness. Rose uses 6 oz butter + 2/3 c. sour cream in her yellow cake for 8.5 oz flour—which is about equal fat to that cake with its butter + cc + sour cream + heavy cream (I don’t have BCC in front of me, but her ratios are usually pretty similar across butter cakes), so it seems to me that he’s just adding a whole bunch of sugar and not lessening the fat much at all. 80% of the non-Rose cakes I see use equal volume sugar & flour, which is 2x weight of suagar:flour, so his sugar content is pretty “mainstream normal.”

BCC is also my fave of Rose’s yellows, too. That and the Golden Lux Butter Cake!

I tried to estimate some comparisons. In the CakeLove cake I estimated the total fat at 5.2 oz, or 61% bakers percentage. The liquid in the CakeLove cake looked really small, so I tried estimating that, but if I assume liquid is supplied by cream cheese, sour cream, milk and so on I end up concluding that there is about 7 oz of liquid, or 86% relative to the flour. In BCC the liquid is about 71% and the fat is 43%.

That said, I don’t get the difference between the lemony hollows and the lemon disappearing. I think I get the lemony hollows concept, if I’m imagining it right, but not the disappearing in the BCC. Can you describe that more?

Unfortunately it was a couple months ago and so my memory is a bit vague. My daughter asked for this cake for her birthday this weekend, which rekindled my interest in trying to improve it.

As I recall the CakeLove version was rather dry with a fine crumb and it had hollow pockets where the lemon chunks were, with concentrated lemon baked on their edges. The BCC version did not have pockets at all. The lemons were hard to notice were blended smoothly into the cake. I don’t think they sank to the bottom, so it wasn’t a support issue. But they didn’t get the moisture sucked out of them like happened with the CakeLove cake. The BCC cake was very moist, maybe even moister than normal, which was a big contrast to the CakeLove cake. Some lemon juice may have escaped from the lemon sections and gotten mixed into the BCC batter which might have made it more acidic than normal.

Note that I’ve never noticed adding lemon zest to really have any effect on a cake. Maybe I need to zest 15 lemons or something, but it just seems to disappear. So it wouldn’t serve to balance the sweetness. The original recipe does call for lemon lemon oil. I suppose I could try soaking the cake with lemon juice after baking.

I also noticed that this recipe uses 1/4 t. baking soda and, if I remember correctly, BCC uses baking powder. The soda may have neutralized something in the lemons to make it work better.

Finally, I see he uses AP flour (with just a bit of corn starch) and Rose uses cake flour. That could have something to do with it, too—maybe total cake flour can’t support the lemon pieces?

While Charles T. is correct in that it makes sense to change one thing at a time, I’m thinking the flour and the leavening differences (although I forget what the leavning in BCC is exactly) might be the culpret preventing this BCC version from working. I know, in Rose’s, if you want to use AP flour, you can usually avoid a dip by reducing BP by 1/4 t. per 9x2 inch layer, so you can try that, although the texture is still a bit different—a fluffy, but slightly larger and denser/moister (you can interpret that either way) crumb.

I actually usually bake the BCC with bleached AP flour. I like the resulting coarser crumb. I had the idea of trying with the Perfect Poundcake recipe, as the CakeLove cake came outo with a pound cake sort of texture.

But cake baking is not an unknown area, where the only way to understand this is to perform exhaustive experiments.

Well, I have to disagree, because experts create recipes in exactly the way I describe. If there were an entry in the dictionary for “exhaustive experiments”, you’d see the words “Rose Levy Beranbaum”. No one here or anywhere can offer you more than speculation about the cause of your problem; the only way you’ll every know is to conduct the experiments I suggested.

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If error is corrected whenever it is recognized as such, the path of error is the path of truth.

Since BCC has no baking soda and the original recipe does, that might have something to do with it. It’s possible the soda, with its neutralizing effect, had some kind of effect with how the lemon behaved.

The original recipe uses UNBLEACHED AP flour, so that, as compared to cake flour (or even bleached AP flour, which behaves more like cake flour than AP flour) would make a difference—the proteins act a bit differently in bleached vs. unbleached—so that could have contributed to the difference, as well. Might want to try the BCC with UNBLEACHED AP.

I have cut sugar a great deal in cakes—even in Rose’s cakes—with perfect success. I made the white velvet and cut sugar by 1/3 and added 1/2 the weight of the sugar back to the cake as liquid (takes a little longer to bake). I’ve also simply cut sugar. If I were to try anything first, I’d try the original recipe and simply cut the sugar by 1/3. Frankly, I’d go to 1/2 the sugar, which is cutting by 1 cup, or 200g. You can water to compensate for the moisture loss—it would theoretically require an extra 1/2 cup water (100g)—but I’d only go maybe 1/4 c. or skip it altogether.

I did two test cakes. I made a Perfect Pound Cake, following the instructions for a denser cake, and substituting bleached AP flour. I mixed in 50 g of lemon sections that I cut in 2-3 pieces. I also took the original recipe and cut the sugar in half, and made that with 70 g of lemon sections.

Both cakes worked: the lemon cooked into pockets as desired. The modified CakeLove cake came out extremely dense with an extremely fine crumb. It rose very little. It also has sections that appear darker, almost as if they weren’t cooked, but they seem to have a cooked texture. And I recall, now, that the same thing happened when i baked the original recipe.

It’s been long enough since I baked the original cake that I don’t recall how the cakes differed. But certainly the one I made with half the sugar was similar to the original.

I made a final cake where I substituted 1 tsp baking powder for the 1/4 tsp baking soda and increased the lemon to 200 g. I also used the two stage mixing method and used 2 egg yolks. (The truth is, I was making half the recipe and didn’t feel like dealing with fractional egg yolks.) Anyway, none of these changes seemed to have a significant effect. I was wondering about the baking soda, since the 1/4 cup of sour cream doesn’t seem to be enough acid to neutralize all the baking soda. I baked my half recipe in a mini bundt pan and got a similar texture as before, with “uncooked” looking sections. Also the cake shrank a lot after coming out of the oven. I vaguely recall that the same thing happened with the original recipe.

The lemon is not mixed into the batter. It is encapsulated in the the chunks of lemon section. So I’m not sure that it counts for neutralizing the baking soda. I made a point, actually, of draining the acumulated lemon juice before adding the sections so that I wasn’t mixing a bunch of lemon juice into the batter.

I could have done the half an egg yolk if I’d felt like it. And I would have done it just the way you suggest, based on weight. I routinely do half-eggs that way.